


Red Steel, the 'hero'

by creatorRunning



Category: Nemesis - April Daniels
Genre: Flashbacks, spoiler for Sovereign: Nemesis (not that big a spoiler tbh but still)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:01:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25925572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatorRunning/pseuds/creatorRunning
Summary: Red Steel reflects on history as he waits for the third Dreadnought to take the mantle.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 12





	Red Steel, the 'hero'

Konstantin Menshov was not having a good day, and to show it, he crushed his titanium stress ball in annoyance.

_Another_ Dreadnought dead, the TV blared at him. That’s the third, now, and Red Steel wasn’t responsible for any of them.

No matter. He’d fought every single one of them, and he’d fight the next one, too.

Red Steel still wasn’t sure what he wanted out of this. His blood sang, as he sat in his dingy Moscow apartment. He had more than enough money to fix this place up, to fix the entire apartment complex up, but he spent most of it getting contractors to fuck off.

A little slice of the Soviet Union. The system he served so faithfully for so long. In defiance of everything – common sense, cost, inconvenience, even communist doctrine telling him to stop brooding on the past – he kept the apartment the exact same way as it had been when he’d moodily watched as the Union fell apart and communism crumble.

He always hated this bit. When Dreadnought died, he would have passed his power onto someone else, and right now, they would be laying low as they and the last Dreadnought’s superfriends worked out ‘media strategy’ and ‘image considerations.’ Then, some new guppy still wet behind the ears would proudly proclaim themselves to be Dreadnought. And then there was the pit of fear that this time, the power would wisp off into space, or disappear. That this was it, that Dreadnought was no more.

All in all, it was a guaranteed three months where Red Steel could be _sure_ that he had nobody to pick a fight with. Everybody else was too squishy. He liked the satisfying crunch of bones – his or his opponents – but with his strength, a baseline human would liquify. He hated that. Even others like him weren't like him. It was just Dreadnought.

Dreadnought was dead, again. And Red Steel had not fought on the same side as this one, but he respected him nonetheless. He poured a beer out for him, sighing in reflection.

The old crone Poroshina banged a broom on her ceiling, swearing at him from below as the cheap beer dripped through the shitty floor and into her living room.

~ **Weeks later** ~

Channel One was blaring out some breaking news. Red Steel paid it half an ear, until the word “Dreadnought” pushed its way into his head. His eyes snapped to the TV. He flicked the sound knob up, his superhuman hearing battling against his old age.

Her statement to the press appeared, and the English was quickly dubbed over by Russian.

“I am Dreadnought,” she began, and went on to explain how she had defeated Utopia – who was really Mistress Malice – and stopped her killing everyone on earth.

Red Steel’s eyes widened. He flashed back to that night.

_He nailed her with blast after blast of laser vision, holding her in his gaze to cook her._

_The second Dreadnought said something stereotypically heroic Steel didn’t remember, perhaps “That’s new!” as he flew into her fists-first, delivering devastating blows to her as he did. Red Steel rolled his eyes, biting his cheek to stop a groan of pain as the collapsed metal frame pinned his legs down._

_Back with Malice and the new Dreadnought, Dreadnought was not doing well. She was pummelling him into the floor, firing blast after blast of electricity into him. Even the relatively weak shocks were clearly doing a number on him, and Red Steel sighed. He was going to have to do something drastic to bail out the capitalist punk, wasn’t he? He didn’t want the idiot to die like his predecessor._

_He braced himself against the pain to come and stared at his legs. The metal was too smooth, proper polished aluminium- one of the few things his lasers would just bounce off. He gritted his teeth and stared at his left leg. That was the one really pinning him down. He was fairly sure he could wiggle out without it._

_Searing pain. It felt ridiculous, but his first thought was that his blood was putting some of the colour back into his costume. A lot of dust had covered it in the fight, and with the blood, it was turning back to its normal crimson. He let out some expletives, and only barely heard Dreadnought, who was solidly on the back foot and bruised all over, yell “Language!” before the last tendons ripped and Red Steel was free. He yanked the other leg out, and then blasted forwards as several Gs to catch Malice as she leered over the form of Dreadnought._

_“Any time you want to join fight would be fine for me.” Steel roared as he pummelled Malice with punches. They scuttled the thing and made their escape._

_He had spent months recovering from the fight. Dreadnought had visited him in his bed in a Soviet hospital. Steel wasn’t worried – neither of them would try anything with so many civilians around. He had asked a pretty simple question. “Is she dead?”_

_Dreadnought nodded. “We found a body. Nobody could’ve survived that.”_

_Red Steel raised an eyebrow. “Best friend is millenia-old Valkyrje. What kind of idiot are you?” Dreadnought just laughed at that, but he looked tired._

_“Yeah, well. Whenever you’re healthy, we’re working on towing the pieces of the wreck off the city.”_

_Red Steel nodded. “Be careful, Dreadnought,” he said. His – enemy? friend? rival? – laughed again, but he grabbed the hero’s arm. “I am serious. World will only be more dangerous from now on.” Some of the patients were beginning to whisper, not sure how to deal with the titans of communism and capitalism acting so chummy._

Guess he had been right. He refocussed his attention on the TV. The translator cut out a few seconds before the new Dreadnought did, and Red Steel cocked his head in confusion. He was well acquainted with the tricks of the old _Pravda_ newspapers, and he knew a lie by omission when he saw one.

Unfortunately, Red Steel didn’t have a computer, and his nearest library was a mile away.

He would just fly, but also unfortunately, Putin had been pressuring Red Steel to come out in support of his new, near-dictatorship bill, and had grounded all superpowered flight until he’d agree to. Arrogant prick.

~ **Later that day** ~

Red Steel was over two metres in height. He weighed 140 kilograms. He could win a punch-out with a meteor. He was one hundred years old.

In short, not the sort of man you often see on a Moscow bus.

He shifted in his seat(s) and tried to ignore the stares he got. He knew most other heroes got asked for autographs, but…

To the old, he represented the fading grandeur of the past they’d grown up believing in. To the young, he represented a barely-remembered dream for something they didn’t know how to feel about. Middle-aged people were too up themselves for an autograph.

He arrived at the library to find it falling apart. He made a mental note to kill someone rich, use a bit of the money to make sure the roof didn’t cave in.

Capitalism had its advantages, when you could fly across the planet in an hour and break the spine of anybody annoying you.

He clicked through the shitty computer interface for nearly half an hour, before he finally found a recording of the speech that wasn’t dubbed.

He played it out loud, and people looked disapprovingly at him. Briefly.

The warbling of the shitty speakers spat out all the stuff he had heard translated into Russian, and then he leaned in towards the grainy screen to watch the last few words that Channel One Russia had decided not to translate.

“I’m transgender, and a lesbian, and I’m not ashamed of that,” she said, defiantly, her eyes losing any tremor of nervousness as she said that.

Red Steel watched the last frame of the video for a few minutes, musing to himself. Truth be told, he didn’t get out much, and his work wasn’t exactly the social type. He knew English, yes, but the longest conversations he had had in it were with Dreadnought, and they were usually ‘banter’ from the other hero, or as he called it, meaningless noise. Not exactly much time dedicated to discussing gender.

So really, it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t understand part of the sentence. He knew lesbian well enough- it was close to the Russian anyway. But it was that other word that was giving him difficulty.

He searched for the term as best he could. Miraculously, the computer somehow understood “tansjendur” and offered him some results.

After a few minutes reading up, he grunted. Some of the articles were covering the new Dreadnought, as well. Some speculated that the Dreadnought mantle had changed her body, much like the websites selling hormones, special-made clothes, and select hypertech claimed to be able to do.

He decided it wasn’t relevant. He decided this after he had searched “transgender people, weaknesses” and a dozen permutations on it.

He came out with a fairly un-nuanced view. A few sites talked about being ‘threatened’ by this, _threatened_ by the _gender_ of a hero who could break your spine with a flick of her pinky finger. Nobody who hadn’t watched an American company’s satellite scream towards their home village, who hadn’t made the speed calculations to see if they could make it in time to stop it and realised they couldn’t, got to say they were ‘threatened’ in the way they did, foreseeing doom from one Dreadnought not matching the others- or more accurately, their expectations.

_He_ was trying to find useful information, and everybody else was going insane about something that didn’t matter. Well, everyone except the places where it was conveniently not mentioned. He supposed it was good for the girl to be able to inspire others like her, but her main role would probably be defender of American imperialism, so. If he’d been familiar with the phrase, he might have said rainbow capitalism was still capitalism.

He gave up trawling the internet and trudged back home.

When he arrived, he found a letter slipped through his door. He opened it with a fingernail and precisely applied force and slipped a contract out of it.

His eyes ratcheted wider a degree in surprise.

Sovereign Industries wanted him on retainer. Hmm.

Normally he wouldn’t bother with corporate jobs- he still held a lingering dislike of capitalism, and these jobs usually had a low amount of actual combat.

But he’d just been thinking the library needed new facilities, and he’d blown the last part of his savings buying the rights to six hundred acres of Siberia – he hadn’t managed to save the village, but he was _damned_ if some fucking developer was going tarmac over the last part of the Siberian wilderness. Of his past.

It couldn’t hurt to take the job, right? It wasn’t like he’d be protecting some supervillain or something.

Yeah.

Quiet job. Low stress. Low stakes. Just what he needed in his old age.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually looked up tansjendur to check if it would actually give results for transgender, and it did lmao
> 
> anyway, hope you enjoyed this. I really like the Nemesis series and I wanted to write a fic about the world surrounding the story, so it was this, or a five-thousand word dissection on how modern history would've changed when we add superheroes to it.  
> (Honestly, the term superhero only makes sense from the point of view of large, relatively stable societies. The implications of someone who can shoot lasers from their eyes in, say, 1980's Belfast, are totally different and also terrifying.  
> in this essay i will-)
> 
> also RS seems too okay with getting dunked on, so like who hurt you dude. why're you cool with getting hospitalised :(


End file.
